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Finally an umbrella that defies the rain. The new Senz umbrella looks as aerodynamic as a Stealth Jet and ostensibly cuts through the rain and wind like one. The umbrella is designed and constructed to withstand 100kph winds and won’t flip inside-out. Its design is modern yet practical. The longer spokes at the back keeps the rain off your heels but more importantly you can turn it sideways and fit two underneath. The eye-savers on the spoke-ends are a thoughtful design feature – ever walked through
crowd on a rainy day? Need I say more? A Sense umbrella will run you £40 if you buy from the website at senzumbrellas.co.uk

Tickets from the Burning Man Main Sale are sold out and many of the festival’s veteran burners have been left out in the cold. Angry Burners have dubbed the recently adopted ticket system a failure as they vent their frustration on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Richard West a.k.a. Mr C, world class DJ from the 90’s electronic music band, The Shamen posted his displeasure with the new system on Facebook yesterday calling the system a “HUGE FAIL” and shaming StubHub for allowing scalpers to use the platform to gauge Burners at $1,500 a ticket!

Last year tickets sold out for the first time in Burning Man’s 25-year history. The new ticket system was intended to make ticket distribution fairer. It involved an initial registration process followed by two rounds of ticket sales.

The first Pre-Sale round happened in November/December 2011 and 3,000 tickets were sold at $420 each with a limit of 4 per person. Next came the Main Sale round which took place in January 2012. In this round, Burners could select the tier price that best reflected their economic circumstances: 40,000 of these tickets were sold at $240, $320 and $390 with a limit of 2 per person. The final Secondary Open Sale is due to happen on March 28th 2012 and 10,000 tickets will be made available for direct purchase at $390 a piece.

This year organisers did away with the Scholarship and Low Income Programs in favour of a single more streamlined Low Income program for Burners who can’t afford the regular lowest priced ticket. Four thousand of these Low Income tickets priced at $160 a piece will be made by special application starting on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 12 noon PST. Applications will be accepted until tickets run out or Monday, May 1, 2012, whichever comes first.

In the previous first-come first-served system, Burners had to get into an online queue and success or failure in procuring a ticket depended on whether you made it into the queue, if you could wait around your computer long enough to be processed and other factors like your internet connectivity etc. The new system was meant to be better because organisers could apply a filtering system to the registrants to remove known scammers, and it resolved the issue of having to queue. However, the new system does not come without it problems either.

Marian Goodell, Director of Business and Communications for Burning Man has acknowledged that only about 20-25% of the key people from major theme camps and art groups have so far received notifications for tickets. It would seem that the introduction of the new system was the impetus for many people to get their friends to purchase tickets for them to increase their chances in the random selection, kind of like how buying 100 lottery tickets as opposed to one increases your chances of winning.

Organisers are discouraging Burners from purchasing tickets from scalpers and secondary sources like eBay, Craigslist and StubHub and asking them to use their Secure Ticket Exchange Program (STEP), a safe and secure web-based system set up by organizers to re-distribute tickets at face-value while protecting Burners from scalpers.

Fans will be quick to point the finger at Burning Man organizers but as the popularity of the Burning Man festival grows so does the impact of the festival on its immediate natural environment and this has a direct effect on regulations set by Nevada’s Bureau of Land Management agency (BLM). At the end of the day the outcome will depend on the compunction of the individuals who cheated the system and bought more than 4 tickets. A true Burner will sell their extra tickets through STEP to ensure that the art and theme camp teams make it to the festival because without them it’s just a bunch of people baking in the desert.

Did you know that you can make your Mac speak to you?

All you have to do is open Applications > Utilities > Terminal. Once the Terminal window opens type Say and hit return (then repeat process).

Then you can go to System Preference and select Speech to control speaking rate and choose from different voices like Fred, Kathy, Princess, Cellos, Boing, Zarvox, Bubbles, Bad News and so on… Post in the comments any creative uses you find for this feature. You can copy/paste large sections of text or song lyrics and have your computer read your children to sleep… or is that unethical? Why not leave a message on your friends answering service in robot?

Now here’s a creepy video of a kid you can be very thankful was never your boyfriend in high school:

Did you know that you can play music directly from DropBox? DropBox has a service called…yep, you guessed it…DropTunes!

DropBox also has a nifty Google Chrome extension which allows you to access your DropBox with the click of a button from your Chrome toolbar. The add-on also has a feature that let’s to see a snapshot of your recent DropBox activities.

One last tool to make you happy is the DropBox Screen Grabber that lets you capture your screen and save it to DropBox. All you do is press Shift + F10 to grab your entire screen or Shift + F11 to grab the current live window. It saves in two formats JPEG and PNG.

Also, did you know that you can get more space by either buying it or by going to www.dropBox.com/gs and completing five or more of the tasks. You also get more space by installing it on other devices, referring friends, and connecting it to social media platforms.

You remember Nyan Cat right? Well now there’s a video game! You can fly through space eating nibbles and getting points. The high score is 1,272 but if you think you can beat it then email robert_Irvine@Dennis.co.UK and you will get mentioned in issue 269 of UK’s favorite internet magazine: WebUser. To give the game a shot for fun, go to: www.nyancatfly.com

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Hi guys, just a quick post to tell you about a great online photo editing program that can be downloaded and is better than Pixlr! It’s called GIMP, short for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

GIMP has capabilities for detailed image retouching, free-form drawing, resizing, editing, cropping photos, photomontages combining multiple images, converting between different image formats, and it can also be used to create basic animated images in the GIF format. Best of all… it’s free!

In March of this year Facebook made a significant change to its site. It used to be that if you wanted to pimp out your Facebook page you had to write code in FBML which is Facebook’s own markup language. Well they have disabled FBML (yay!) and you can now use HTML!

In addition to dropping FBML they have introduced iframes. Iframes allow you to splice in “pages” on FB called tabs.

If you want to make a tab on your page here are couple ways to do it. If you know HTML you can write your own code and use Static HTML: iframe tabs, an app on Facebook to create iframes. Or, if you’re not able to write code, have no fear because there is a really cool free downloadable program called Kompozer that you can use like a design program which will convert your designs into HTML code.

Another way to produce the iframes for your FB page is to use a site called FaceItPages. FaceItPages has a free version that is quite limited but for $29 a month you can get 12 iFrames custom pages and 15 tab pages per iFrame (for linking to any external website or blog). You can upload video, photos, music and many other things including links to your social networks. also, included in this price is the option to remove all Faceitpages branding for a more professional look.

It used to be that the only way to import your Facebook friends contact info into Gmail was to do it manually. Now you merely have to jump through hoops. Luckily Yahoo! has a Facebook import function, unlike Gmail. Facebook however, recently removed application tabs like LinkedIn from User Profile, but they do permit it on Page Profiles. So unfortunately importing to Gmail and LinkedIn requires that you first import to Yahoo!

From Yahoo select Contacts > Tools > Import > Facebook

Now your Facebook contacts are in Yahoo you can easily import them to LinkedIn: From LinkedIn select Contacts > Add Connections and enter your email address and password.

Now to get them into Gmail: From Gmail (slightly more tricky) select My Contacts > More Actions > Import. A window will open asking you for a CSV file extension. To get this you must go to Yahoo! and select Contacts > Tools > Export. A window will open and several options are listed, select: Yahoo! CSV and click Export Now. A CSV file will download to your PC Downloads folder.

Return to Gmail and select the Yahoo CSV file from your Downloads folder. Then tick the box asking if you want to add the imported contacts and select either Facebook or My Contacts or New Group. If you select My Contacts your Facebook contacts from Yahoo will merge with your existing Gmail contacts, if you select the FaceBook option your FB contacts will save in a separate file called FaceBook, or you can give it a different name by selecting the New Group option.